What Noom and Keto, Crossfit and Planet Fitness taught me about coaching? (and evangelism)
My Facebook feed is blowing up with ads for Noom and I have family members making great traction losing weight on the Keto diet. If you know someone in Crossfit, well, you’ve heard all about it. Personally, I’m all in on MyFitnessPal and Planet Fitness.
What do all these things have in common?
They work!
And the people who do them most often want to share their pathway.
They have good intentions. They want you to experience the success they are experiencing. But here’s the thing.
Not everyone’s journey is the same. Some people prefer to exercise alone and some like group accountability. Some people want to go fast and hard toward their goal and others want a sustainable long term pace.
God made us all different. We all have different triggers and targets.
However, we all have something in common as well. We all have a tendency to want to tell others what worked for us and offer it as THE pathway toward THEIR best future.
Who knows? Our “thing” might work for them, but at the same time if we tell them what to do their likelihood of jumping into our plan actually goes down.
People don’t like being told what to do.
They like choices. They crave options. And God put freewill in the blue plans for how He wanted this world to run.
Coaching, real coaching, is all about options. It’s about the person being coached choosing well and the coach assisting them to feel strong about their forward movement.
If you really want to help people, here’s the pro-tip for today: stop telling them what works for you and start asking them questions about what they think would work for them. (Not sure where to start - coach training could help!)
P.S. Coaching works in evangelism to. When we tell people what we think they should do it is far less effective, or attractive, than asking them what they are looking for and helping them choose well.
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